Jane Wilson

Art Review by Donald Goddard

There are places
you can stand up or sit in the plains (where Jane Wilson grew up, in Iowa), or
along the shore (where she now has a house with her husband, in eastern Long
Island) and see a great deal of sky above and narrow strips of land and/or water
under that. Your eyes are the horizon, the dome of your brain a much smaller
version of the dome of the sky, even to the point of emulating, in reverse, its
dappled appearance and constant activity. Below the eyes, below the horizon,
is the rest of the body, the earth, undoubtedly though querulously connected
to the dome above. Lying on your back you only see the sky, horizontal now like
the horizon and far away, dreaming. The sky assumes the place of thought, of
making art.

Eventide, 2002.
Oil on linen, 24" x 24".

Seeing, remembering, and imagining are combined. Wilson makes
a few sketches and watercolors on site, presumably on or near the beach facing
the Atlantic Ocean, or perhaps the bay side, but work on the paintings themselves
is done in her New York City studio. Her head and eyes become the sky rising
from sea and land. Weather becomes the equivalent of consciousness, which is
always in the process of forming, changing, until immanence is reached, which
is constant. The final painting is not the achievement of form or harmony but
of a conditional immanent state, of which there have been several before in the
process. In an interview with Justin Spring, Wilson quoted Joshua Reynolds saying
about a portrait of his, "Underneath are many versions, some better, some worse."
Wilson's paintings are compelling because we can see all those versions; they
represent thought, and we automatically, instinctively, make the connection with
our own sporadically attended thought processes.

Whirlwind, 2002.
Oil on linen, 70" x 70".

When Jackson Pollock said, "I
am nature," he seemed to be proclaiming himself, at least from the usual inflection
it is given, an elemental force. It was, in a way, a declaration of independence
from traditional ways of thinking about the subjects of art; about figures and
still lifes and landscapes. In a sense, Wilson's paintings are curiously inverted
expressions of that dictum, inverted because they both are nature and they are
about nature. She knows that what is out there is infinitely changeable and that
the painting process itself proves that there is a continuous connection, through
her eyes and mind and what she has learned to do with her hand, between what
is out there and what is in her. Every gesture of the brush is like a gust of
wind, every infusion of color like an increase or decrease in moisture that affects
the brightness and color of light.

Except for the fact that you sense all the layers that have
preceded the last one, you don't really know what is underneath. You do know
from experience that what is there now evolved from something else, and that
there are several patterns containing millions of possibilities: blues, yellows,
reds, oranges, purples, grays, wispy shapes, turbulent, curvilinear shapes, mottled
patterns, etc. The great yellow swath of Eventide spreads upward and outward
in a way that balances the light blue sky and the dark blue horizon, but it also
seems to obey its meteorological destiny. The quilted clouds of Whirlwind
spiral toward the light in the upper half like a migrating flock of birds, paying
attention to some secret geometry, just like the painter herself.